If you upload your book trailer to YouTube, one limitation is the inability to have a clickable Call to Action.
In business terms, a Call to Action is a request to the viewer to DO something. Click here to take advantage of today’s discount.
Click here to buy. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
Good marketing campaigns focus on the CTA and everything is designed to get the customer to DO this one thing. (ONLY one CTA per trailer, please!)
Up until now, you couldn’t get a CTA to be clickable on YouTube. You could put the CTA at the end of your video, but the viewer must type in your URL themselves.
But watch a video on YouTube and you’ll see a transparent ad across the lower section. And that ad is clickable.
ReelSEO has detailed instructions, including screen shots, of how to set this up for your video. Essentially, it’s a workaround. You set it up, but you never set it into action except for yourself on your own videos. It becomes a Clickable CTA for you, not an ad for someone else. It’s a detailed process, but these instructions make it easy.
You can see this at work on these two videos. NOTE: the overlay doesn’t show up on embedded videos, only those viewed on YouTube, so you have to go to YouTube to see this in action.
If you write for teens and are working on a book trailer for a young adult (YA) novel, you need to know what will capture a teen’s eyes for those precious one to two minutes.
Humor. Duh. Of course, humor motivates teen audiences. Spoofs, parodies, gross-outs, laugh-out-loud–make ‘em laugh and they will watch.
Sharable. And if they watch, they will share. “Hey, look at this, it’s funny.” That is golden. Look for the right places to share the videos, places where teens are very likely to pass a video along to a friend. (73% of teens are on social sites!)
Findable. Put videos where they can be found, but also make sure your keywords, tags and titles make them findable–and relevant to the teen audience.
Watchable. I’m throwing in here anything that will get a teen to watch more than 5 seconds of a video. Compelling images, script, music. Originality and creativity. Unique and fresh. What makes YOUR video–your book trailer–stand out in today’s crowded market?
The goal should not be “How do I get X to watch our video?” Instead, focus on how your video’s content and marketing can leverage your organization’s existing customer relationships and also further their development so you can benefit in the future. And always think about how your video will fit into your target’s normal browsing flow. Most consumers have decided how to interpret and judge a video by the time they click ‘Play.’ Quoting Benjamin Goering, Livefyre from the ReelSEO article
Storytelling.
Panel moderator Stewart Quality said, “social media is the campfire of which we sit around and share our stories.”
Think about your book trailer as something that adds to the story of our culture. Make it fun/funny, sharable, findable, watchable and tell a compelling story. And pull in the teen viewers.
OK, this is not a trailer, but it’s a fun video about books. It’s a great example of stop-action video. Imagine doing this and featuring YOUR book somewhere in the mix. Put it in unexpected places. Or put a photo frame, stuffed animal or something else that relates to your book here. Great fun.
When it comes to book trailers, it feels a little like the Wild West. Not so with movie trailers. That genre is firmly established, the trailers being well funded and highly produced. Even trailers for bad movies are often engaging. All the studios used to hire Don LaFontaine, that man with the really deep voice, until his death in 2008. After he died, they hired other men with really deep voices. Movie trailers often end with a loud boom, followed by a soft whisper, like a fireworks finale followed by an amateur’s sparkler. The entire formula is satirized perfectly here.
Book trailers are relatively new, are mainly an internet phenomenon, and, in my experience, often follow the same formula as movie trailers—to disastrous effect. The reasons?
Budget. Book trailers don’t have anywhere near the budget of movie trailers. Hence, the attempt looks silly.
Too melodramatic. Big-budget movie trailers, even for good movies, are usually highly melodramatic. So too are book trailers that copy the formula. Maybe because we expect our literature to be less melodramatic than our movies, the result comes across as really melodramatic.
Usurping reader’s imagination. When we read a book, we create a world in our mind. If the author does his or her job right, that world is as full and real and nuanced as our own. Do we really want that literary world presented to us visually ahead of time?
A more basic way to state the problem is that movie trailers contain clips of movies. And movies are shot to be visually engaging. Books are printed on a page. The image exists only in our imagination.
What’s a Writer to Do?
So what the heck is a writer with a new book from a small literary press to do?
OPPOSITE of Big Budget. In my case: head to Wal-Mart, buy a white board, a black marker, and create the exact opposite of a big-budget movie trailer.
My talents as a visual artist have something like a Flowers-for-Algernon trajectory. Sometime around the first or second grade, my work became fairly impressive for a first or second grader. Squares? No problem. Triangles? Please. Then came glorious third grade, where I’d copy Dr. Seuss or A. A. Milne characters onto a large sketch pad and my teacher would display it on an easel for the whole class. I could draw, man. Hell, I could draw man. Woman. Yertle the Turtle.
That was the zenith. Before long, I was a not-so-impressive artist for a fifth grader. By the eighth grade I had become a hack. No one is impressed by an eighth grader who can copy a passable Winnie the Pooh from a book. In truth, my Winnie the Pooh stopped being passable long before then. My artistic abilities actually seemed to atrophy over the years to the point where now I can draw only stick figures.
But it turns out that stick figures were exactly what the job demanded. After all, the aim was to create the opposite of a big-budget movie trailer.
Script. For my trailer, I wrote out a brief script that narrated, sort of, one of the weirder stories in my collection. (It features talking funerary ashes and a godlike baby and a babysitting rabbit.)
Voice-Over. Then I convinced my friend Troy, who has this wonderfully anti-heroic voice, to read my script. He knocked it out in a single take. I edited out some pauses to speed up the pacing, then began to animate to the script.
Software. I’d found a program online called Monkey Jam that allowed me to take photographs with a web camera, string them together, and sync them to an audio file.
Trailer! For better or worse, the result speaks for itself—many hundreds of drawings on the white board, most of them awful, resulting in a clunky stop-motion animation. Yet in the end, I think, it is a fairly appealing trailer with an original and consistent vibe that conveys a sense of the book.
It’s no high-budget movie trailer, that’s for sure. It isn’t going to win an Academy award for animated short. But it is a trailer that people seem to enjoy and actually watch. It’s steadily accruing youtube hits, and people have passed it around on Facebook, and it recently appeared on the Galleycat website.
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Two postscripts
PS. The “blooper reel” was a complete afterthought. I was a little slap-happy from spending three long days at the white board. I already had the equipment set up, and now I had a little experience with the technology. So I banged that out in a day, using some drawings from the trailer and some new drawings, with my wife and me supplying the additional voices.
P.P.S. My trailer-making equipment—the white board, the black marker—is currently enjoying a happy retirement out in the garage, next to the dart board.
Michael Kardos is the author of the story collection One Last Good Time. His stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies and were cited as Notable Stories in the 2009 and 2010 editions of Best American Short Stories. Originally from the Jersey Shore, he currently teaches creative writing at Mississippi State University.
Canadian writer Tony Burgess’ new book, People Live Still in Cashtown Corners debuts this week with a trailer made by filmmaker Bruce McDonald. The two collaborated on Pontypool, a film based on a Burgess novel.
This certainly brings the book trailer made in the movie aesthetic mode to a higher level. And it’s certainly getting the press, mostly because a filmmaker has stooped to the level of a one-minute trailer for a book. This is shown in the YouTube information about the Cast and Crew:
Cast & Crew
Director: Bruce McDonald
Writer: Tony Burgess
Cinematographer: Michael LeBlanc
Editor: Mina Sewell Mancuso
Music Courtesy of Harmonia Mundi
Tony Burgess as Bob Clark
Charlie Baker as Charlie Baker
Jayde Barlow as Patricia Lerner
Amber-Lynn Webber as Helen Lerner
Ed Gataveckas as Jeffrey Lerner
Music:
Requiem in D minor (K. 626) + Kyrie (K. 341)
Directed by Philippe Herreweghe
Collegium Vocale Ghent, La Chapelle Royale, Orchestre des Champs-Elysées
Recorded live in 1994 and released in 1997 by Harmonia Mundi.
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It doesn’t appear to be much different from any other in that mode to me. The strength is in the choice of music, the fluid images and transitions and the restraint used to keep it at one minute.
NOTE: There was some confusion about how the award was spelled. In the original announcement, it was Trailie; but SLJ says, “After the original announcement people people began to call it TRAILEE so in an interim story we said we would go with Trailee as the spelling used in logo.”
Disappointing is the failure to identify who created some of the videos. Of course, there are privacy concerns, especially in the student-created category. But at least identifying the school represented would seem to be appropriate.
Following each video are my comments.
Publisher/Author created for elementary readers (PreK-6)
Shark vs. Train, by Chris Barton, Little Brown
(1843 YouTube Views; 215 Views on Vimeo; not on TeacherTube)
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BTM Comments: This video follows a strong movie trailer aesthetic. The best thing here, as in the book, is the juxtaposition of shark and train and the narrator. It does seem that strong books make for strong trailers.
Publisher/Author created for secondary readers (7-12)
Ghostgirl: Lovesick, by Tonya Hurley, Hachette
(51,311 YouTube views; 270 Views on Vimeo; not on TeacherTube)
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BTM Comments: Animation is the clear winner in this trailer. Otherwise, it’s just music with some video.
Adult (18 +) created for elementary readers (PreK-6)
14 Cows for America, by Carmen Agra Deedy, Peachtree
Book trailer created by Analine Johnson (see interview here) who is the librarian at Centeno Elementary in Laredo, Texas.
(248 Views on YouTube; 2638 Views on TeacherTube; 178 Views on Vimeo)
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BTM Comments: Johnson’s strength is in selection of music and images. This is a slide-show aesthetic trailer, but the choice of poignant and rich piano music combined with great images makes this work. For example, the transition from the young boy’s eye full of fire, to the fire cloud of the Twin Towers is quite effective. It’s another case where a strong book makes for a strong video.
Adult created for secondary readers (7-12)
Unwind, by Neal Shusterman
Created by June Henson, who is the librarian at Downing Middle School in Flower Mound, Texas.
(281 Views on YouTube; 246 on Vimeo; 458 on Teacher Tube)
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BTM Comments: For this slide-show aesthetic trailer, Henson chose a strong red text against a black background, proving that good graphic design matters in a book trailer.
Student created for elementary readers (PreK-6)
Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, by Mo Willems, Hyperion.
Creator not identifed. (272 Views on Vimeo; not on YouTube or TeacherTube.)
BTM Comments: Of course, this one won. High school is a time when students learn to create Powerpoints and this is a perfect example of that sort of silent-movie aesthetic of a Powerpoint presentation.
What was the original concept for the trailer and how did you come up with it?
In the beginning, I confess I had no idea what I was doing! My husband Shiraz and I put together a script and creative brief on the star players, photos of what I thought they looked like, set descriptions, sound effects, music (the amazing “Ironspy” song from our friends at Splashdown)—the works. It was complex…a bit too complex, we realized, as we started looking into it. Then my writing friend Molly Blaisdell hooked us up with her screenwriting partner, independent filmmaker Paul Michael Gordon. His work is breathtaking, and miraculously, he wanted to do our project.
Originally we were thinking live action, but Paul does beautiful work with video and motion graphics. Then he came back with a concept using illustrations, which was totally unexpected and amazing. We all fell in love and refined it from there.
What software/hardware did you use?
An ambrosia of various programs—Paul uses mostly After Effects. Shiraz used Illustrator to refine the images, I recorded the voiceover on my iPhone(!), and Shiraz layered the music and voice with SoundBooth and Adobe Premiere.
What was the biggest problem you faced in producing the trailer and how did you overcome that problem?
I think the biggest challenge was refining the illustrations and the order of the images to reflect the story. In the first draft, the girl hugging her knees appeared at the “my parents have been lying to me all along” part. That image is such an emotional hook for me, just right for main character Miranda. So we moved her to the beginning and brought in the girl holding the bird, which I love—birds are a leitmotif in the novel. We also made significant alterations to the sister character in the storm to look like Xanda in the book. Then Shiraz worked on the timing of the voiceover and sound effects to get it just right. He produced the project, and he and Paul worked closely on all of the details.
You’ve been active promoting the trailer in various places. So many times, this effort seems wasted. Can you tell where it has made the most impact and where you wouldn’t worry about again?
I don’t feel like any efforts were wasted—and there is always more that can be done! I’m very grateful that so many friends and bloggers wanted to participate in the launch, where over a hundred bloggers linked to the trailer on YouTube and invited others to spread the word. We had a big party with prizes, and tons of people contacted me to say they had posted or tweeted or Facebooked. We also posted the trailer on Amazon, Goodreads, and are actively looking for places to spread the word. (Speaking of which…I need to put it up on TeacherTube…) On the flipside, I try very hard to be respectful of my friends and fans…I don’t want to inundate them with me all the time!
Everyone always wants to know: do book trailers sell books? Do you have any statistical or anecdotal info to share on this?
I wish we knew a way to track that! I don’t have any numbers, but I do see lots of comments from readers who plan to check out the book based on the trailer. Here are some of my favorites:
“I’m so intrigued. I’m definitely reading this book now!”
“If I hadn’t already read this amazing debut, I’d be scrambling to get my hands on a copy.”
“Gorgeous and riveting.”
“This book looks amazing!!”
I do think producing a trailer has helped raise the awareness of the book on a wider scale, and it’s fun to be able to point to it in interviews. And an honor to be a finalist in the SLJ Trailie Awards!
